If you base your business entirely on the API of another company, your entire business is at the mercy of that company and can be destroyed on a whim. This is especially true of free APIs though it also applies to paid ones.
.... and it is evil on the part of the company providing the API to copy features from the best apps written for that API and cut off those developers by simply amending their ToS to say that such and such is not allowed... after they've co-opted that feature.
I think the tone of this comment was lost in translation. I'm not saying I agree with this practice, it's abhorrent. But it has happened enough times over the years that a company building something on top of a free API has to basically expect things to go south like this.
While true, it shouldn't be. It's only this way because our laws are broken such that companies with a lot of money can intimidate upstarts by threatening to sue over their extraction of public, non-copyrightable data. It's even worse than the already-draconian copyright restrictions that are also used to shore up entrenched players at the expense of innovators, since the law is often interpreted to mean that you can't download any data at all, regardless of its copyright status (even if the data is owned by the user, and they're asking you to extract that data on their behalf), without the prior written consent of the company that runs the server. If a company decides they don't want you to access their server anymore, they claim trademark infringement, copyright infringement, tortious interference, and trespass to chattels, and unless you have tens of millions just sitting around that you wanted to spend on lawyers this year, you're SOL. It obviously shouldn't be that way, and the world would be a joke if the same rules were applied to non-digital resources.
If anyone has a real answer to this legal problem, please let me know. The EFF hasn't been taking it on.
